Biden camp not sweating political fallout from latest round of campus protests

President Joe Biden condemned the anti-Israel protests embroiling college campuses this week, sparking backlash among those who oppose the Gaza war and raising new questions about his standing with younger voters.

But, so far, campaign aides say they do not see it ballooning into more of a problem for the reelection bid. Those doing the protesting, they believe, are a subset of a subset of the electorate, one that’s drawn a disproportionate amount of media coverage compared to its actual political clout.

“What is happening in Gaza is not the top issue for [young voters]. It's not going to be for the vast majority of young voters the thing that's going to determine whether they vote or how they vote,” said a campaign official working on youth engagement who was granted anonymity to speak about internal thinking. “The reality is that the folks that are organizing, the goal of that organizing is to make it seem that way and to bring that attention to it.”

The Biden campaign’s relative nonchalance toward the political fallout from the latest round of protests comes as polling data consistently shows him lagging with young voters and failing to meet comparable levels of support from 2020, though still beating former President Donald Trump in polling. And it has unnerved some Democrats, who believe the backlash over the war in Gaza could potentially deny the president a second term.

But other operatives say data supports the notion that other issues, mainly the economy, are having more influence on young voters’ frustration with the president than the war in Gaza. In a recently released Harvard Youth Poll , 27 percent of respondents said economic issues concerned them the most, while 8 percent said the same of foreign policy/national security issues. Drilled down even further, just 2 percent of respondents said the “Israel/Palestine” conflict concerned them the most.

“As of two weeks ago, I have not seen evidence that this is on its way to being a cultural phenomenon,” said John Della Volpe, the director of polling at the Harvard Kennedy School Institute of Politics who specializes on Gen Z surveys . “One of the more enlightening findings [and] it was somewhat surprising from the poll last week was that despite what we're seeing … this isn't an issue that most young people are prioritizing right now.”

Biden has, for months, tried to calibrate his response to the domestic unrest over his handling of the Israel-Hamas war amid widespread public outrage over civilian deaths in Gaza.

The White House has engaged stakeholders, been more public in its disagreements with the Israeli government and expressed more empathy to those protesting the war. A self-described Zionist and longtime defender of Israel, Biden has gradually grown more critical of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

But a rhetorical sweet spot remains elusive. Over the weekend, the president put out a statement in which he condemned the campus protests for fostering antisemitism. That followed a far harsher statement from a White House aide calling out the protestors for harassing Jewish students. Both statements led anti-Israel protesters and anti-war activists to accuse the White House of being too quick to reprimand just one side of the debate.

One Columbia student who has been involved in the protests told POLITICO that she and her friends have less faith in Biden “every single day.”

“I was excited to vote for Biden. I was excited to vote out a fascist from government. And in hindsight, I guess I see that, I was just putting someone who's a little bit less evil, but evil nonetheless,” said the student, who was granted anonymity because of fear of retribution.

By Monday, Biden appeared to equivocate, noting that while he condemned the protesters, he also condemned those who didn’t appreciate the plight of Palestinians.

White House aides say that there has been no shift. One official stressed that Biden sees antisemitism on college campuses and the plight of the Palestinians as two distinct issues. When the president first saw videos and stories circulating about the campus protests, including the harassment of Jewish students, he wanted a statement crafted to address just that. By Monday, he wanted to make clear that Gaza and the broader situation for Palestinians remained top of mind.

His comments also laid bare the months of political scar tissue that Biden has built up since the start of the Israel-Hamas war. The president is now heckled by protesters at nearly every public appearance, often chanting “genocide Joe.” And inside the White House, aides are acutely aware that the dissatisfaction among a portion of the party base is a liability, even if they downplay its electoral impact.

“Anything that brings chaos to the Democratic brand is detrimental to the Biden campaign,” said Dan Sena, a consultant who led the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee in 2018. “I’m most concerned about young people and how they view inflation, but the protests also present a challenge,” Sena added.

So far, there have been few tests of the extent of discontent over Gaza. Aside from the “uncommitted” movement, which urged Democrats to vote against Biden in primaries to register their frustration for his support of Israel.

The larger impact of the protests, Democrats argue, is in shaping the broader conversation around Biden’s presidency and his standing heading into the election, especially on social media platforms like TikTok.

Breaking through dissatisfaction over Gaza has proved difficult, in part because many of the young people taking part in demonstrations consume news from nontraditional sources.

“Young people are seeing constant images on social media of war in Gaza, of starving children and news reports of the Biden administration sending more unfettered aid to Israel,” said a top Democratic congressional aide who was granted anonymity to speak candidly about a sensitive issue. “So, even if Gaza is not their top polling issue, by them seeing a nonstop media diet of negative news about Biden is a problem for us.”

The Biden campaign, while downplaying the effects of the Gaza conflict on youth voters, has still taken steps to try and shore up that cohort. In March, it launched an organizing program called Students for Biden-Harris that is designed to reach young people on campus and online.

“And the third bucket is that we are really focusing on how to reach young voters, not only those who are on campus but those who are off campus,” said the campaign official working on youth engagement, “knowing that the youth vote and the student vote are not synonymous.”

The campaign and the White House have also leaned on young electeds like Reps. Maxwell Alejandro Frost and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Frost will be out on the campaign trail for the president, while Ocasio-Cortez traveled with Biden during his Earth Day events, where he issued his first public statement on the campus protests.

"I truly do not believe this is a lesser of two evils type of situation, I think about what conditions I want to be organizing under the next four years,” Ocasio-Cortez said to journalist Mehdi Hasan last week. “You can look at both of these individuals oppositionally as well. Even in places of stark disagreement, I'd rather be organizing under Biden as an opponent on an issue than Trump."